MUSIC VIEW

MUSIC VIEW; A Mainstream Conductor Joins the Early-Music Act

By John Rockwell

Published: July 23, 1989

Simon Rattle's conducting of Mozart's ''Nozze di Figaro'' at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in southern England this summer is an important historical event - what might be called the missing link in the evolution of the early-music movement.

For these performances - and for ''Cosi Fan Tutte'' and ''Don Giovanni,'' which he will address in future summers - Mr. Rattle has chosen not the London Philharmonic, which has normally accompanied Glyndebourne operas, but the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, a period-instruments band.

The success of this venture lay not in the timbral pungency of the old instruments, which in fact have sounded better in friendlier acoustical surroundings. Nor did it lie in Mr. Rattle's commendable attention to vocal and even instrumental ornamentation.

What made this a noteworthy occasion was Mr. Rattle's application of the sort of care and control to an original instruments ensemble that he or any other superior modern conductor might lavish on the Vienna Philharmonic or the Cleveland Orchestra. This was a true festival performance, with everything considered and rehearsed and executed with loving care. Just how ''authentic'' all this orchestral subtlety may have been was almost beside the point: what we had was a late-20th century musician making gorgeous music using an ensemble that both suited the composer and challenged the conductor's imagination.

This is an evolutionary, not to say revolutionary, step because it marks the most dramatic incursion thus far of established conductors - or what one local instrumentalist likes to call ''real'' conductors - into the early-music arena.

This move comes at a time when the movement has advanced into the standard late Classical/Romantic repertory in which major orchestras have long concentrated; and when any number of early-music specialists have taken to conducting such orchestras, and applying ideas learned from original instruments to their modern equivalents.

Thus we have seen successive waves of early-music stars move on to standard orchestras, from Raymond Leppard and Neville Marriner to Nikolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood and, now, Trevor Pinnock. Roger Norrington represents a middle ground, in that he developed his reputation as an early-music specialist and as a mainstream conductor simultaneously, and thus may owe part of his current success to lessons learned and skills accrued from establishment ensembles.

What the early-music conductors have brought to orchestras like the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam (where Mr. Harnoncourt has been especially active) and the San Francisco Symphony (particularly venturesome in inviting early-music luminaries) has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, the attention to matters of pitch, ornamentation, balances, phrasing and attack has proven that many of the delights of period-instruments playing can be transferred to conventional groups - that this movement is as much a matter of style as it is of raw sound.

But the disadvantage has been the encouragement of a certain blandness in the music-making. This, in turn, is either a reflection of a lack of talent among the early-music conductors (the view held by jealous conventional musicians) or a result of the deliberate playing down of the conductorial role. Conductors in Mozart's and Beethoven's day, the early-music specialists argue, were at best embryonic, if they can be said to have existed at all; hence to apply modern interpretive niceties in the post-Wagnerian manner is anachronistic. But the result of such a purist approach, however intelligent and well-meaning, has often been a reinforcement of an already-too-prevalent depersonalization in our present-day musical life.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was intended in large measure to overcome that liability, and to attract successful conductors to the early-music movement. Based in London, it consists of most of the same players who work with Mr. Norrington, Mr. Gardiner, Mr. Pinnock and Mr. Hogwood. But it does without a single music director, and was thus designed from the start to attract not just a variety of early-music stars, but mainstream maestros as well.

So far, however, its luck in capturing such busy butterflies has been erratic. The two best-known names to lead the group have been Charles Mackerras and Mr. Rattle. Mr. Mackerras has released a couple of recordings with the ensemble, of Schubert's Symphony No. 9 and Mendelssohn's ''Italian'' Symphony. They sound ordinary, unilluminated by the revelations Mr. Rattle is providing this summer at Glyndebourne.

But while Mr. Rattle can thus claim primacy, as the first ''real'' conductor to shape important performances with an original-instruments orchestra, he will surely not be the last. The wave of the future will be a merging of the insights of the early-music movement into the mainstream - not the abolition of the London Symphony in favor of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, or the fading away of the entire early-music movement, as its trendy cachet ebbs, but a blending of two traditions, one hallowed by oral transmission and deeply ingrained habit, the other born of scholarship and recreative imagination.

Eventually, established orchestras will adapt their styles and sounds to older music, at the very least by playing with historical awareness and perhaps even by some members taking up the ''unimproved'' versions of their regular instruments as a sideline. And ensembles like the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will expand in size and stretch their period awareness to encompass most of the mainstream repertory into the early 20th century.

In both cases, performances will require conductors with a greater historical sensitivity than most reveal today. And that is why Mr. Rattle's ''Figaro'' is so important - not just as a beguiling interpretation of a masterpiece, but as a harbinger of the orchestral future.

And in case anyone feels that Glyndebourne has abandoned conventional instruments and radical directorial reinterpretations of the classics, it has not. Next summer's new Mozart production will offer the London Philharmonic in ''Die Zauberflote.'' The director? Peter Sellars.